mortella-for-v4-Question

I am interested in this product:http://www.daz3d.com/shop/mortella-for-v4
But I would like to know where I can find the dress she is wearing?
It would be great if products had Related products listed somewhere with the product we are viewing.
Thank you!:cheese:

Towards the bottom of page 2 on that archived thread, I posted a link and image to a chair I made as a freebie. I used the Pharoah of The Sun dress and painted in the spidery tails, plus a transparency map from one of Chohole's sets. http://chohole.ovbi.org/page_2.htm

Yeah I saw the link to that chair and went and got it! Great chair and thanks for giving it away..it is beautiful! Good idea for the dress too..I may just have to get her and use that idea..thank you so much for this info! :)

Nope, I never released the dress anywhere, so whatever was at that site, it's not the Mortella Dress.

The difficulties with releasing it is that it was done specifically for Mortella's bodyshape, and UVmapped accordingly. To be released to the public I would need to reshape it to V4, add the Mortella shape as a morph, probably add a few morphs, re-map it to be something more suitable for the average shape, then start dealing with the setup necessary to keep the spidery bits semi-rigid. Then probably also rig it to avoid disappointment for Studio users. And rigging for something that tight would probably be near-impossible to get right.

It's not something that I can honestly say I've had the time to do since I originally made it. I've done similar work for the V4 version of the Cherubim Dress for one of the Christmas giveaways, and it was quite a bit of work, without the re-mapping or re-texturing, so I am familiar with the time it would take.

Thanks for your reply Arien..it is just that the dress really makes the figure that was being promoted so it is a bit of a bummer :(
I realize there is alot of work that goes into something like that..perhaps maybe they should have promoted her wearing something that was obtainable.
It was a nice dress but not on the market...

Thanks for your reply Arien..it is just that the dress really makes the figure that was being promoted so it is a bit of a bummer :(
I realize there is alot of work that goes into something like that..perhaps maybe they should have promoted her wearing something that was obtainable.
It was a nice dress but not on the market...

Well, the problem with custom body morphs is the lack of support. Back when Maelwenn was working on her, she was going for a toon character that had the whole Elvira/Morticia vibe going on, and it's well known that I am an unrepented goth so I found the idea quite appealing. She needed something to put on the character and I whipped out the dress in a few hours, so she could get promos done. At the moment she made the character and the promos, NOTHING OUT THERE FITTED HER because the morph is, if I remember correctly, 100% original, not dialed, or at least it uses a custom body morph for the general shape, so whatever she had used, it would still not be available. But that's the nature of the beast with original morphs, unless at the same time you partner with a cloth maker and have something done to fit, as she did with Luthbel and me for Valeria, or Surreality did for a couple of her Warrior Maidens, partnering with 4Blueyes and me. With such an extreme shape this is even more so, and of course, back then Morphing Clothes was also not available.

Neither of us expected the dress would get the amount of attention it got, and it took both of us quite by surprise! We were expecting some fits would come for existing items to approximate it, I guess. Back then I did ask DAZ whether they would be interested in me finishing it off, but since it's dynamic and Poser only, and historically the market for simple dynamics is quite small, they declined, understandably.

I can check whether I still have the original mesh and put it up AS IS, with no V4 fit, only for Mortella, and leave the annoyances of decorated groups to someone else... I'd probably just triangulate the mesh to get better dynamics and that's it, and in that case yes, I could make it available. But that does sound a bit like a cop-out, and it would still not work on anything other than Mortella. :( And of course, this would leave out any Carrara, Vue or DAZ Studio user too. That's why I haven't released it, because the potential users would be so limited.

Well I certainly would be interested in the dress for Mortella if it was to come on the market. I was strongly considering buying her without the dress because there is always other options..however..that dress really makes her IMO!
Perhaps you should get with the creator of her and do a bundle type thing, like some of the other toons come with clothing that only fits that toon?? Do'nt know if that is possible or not or if Daz would even allow it.
I can certainly understand why you have not wished to do anymore with it since it is dynamic and dynamic just is not that popular and there is so much that goes into creating such a product..it is alot of work that just would not pay for itself in the long run...it was just a disappointment to many of us that the dress that was shown on the promo was not available to give her" that look!"..I love the goth and it would be soooo cool ( but alot of work I know ) to create a series of "similar" Adams characters.
I bet they would sell like hot cakes..especially around Halloween time! Thanks again for writing..I appreciate it much! ;)

Well, we sort of tried before release, as I said above... Mortella was released as a PA product originally and back then I asked DAZ, DAZ said no to the dress (with good reason, I have to say, as dynamics for Poser didn't sell well). Right now Mortella is a DAZ Original, so the bundle would be out of the question.

Again, if it helps people, I will be happy to release the OBJ into the wild as a freebie, on the understanding that it does have its limitations... it's not unheard of people not releasing some small items as freebies simply because the amount of time that the support for them eats up, combined with the dissapointment of things not working for a big segment of the market can't offset the goodwill. I've released items requiring RTE before and it's been the case for those, sadly... way too much time spent explaining to people how to decore, or why the decoding was needed, that prevents me from doing actual work.

But I'm stubborn, so I'd be happy to try again. On the condition that if the support requests overwhelm me (that is, if it's more trouble to keep it available than it's worth), I might have to remove it. Does that work for you?

Well yes that works for me very much indeed! I mean you cant get any better than Free! That is very generous of you to put effort at all into providing it for free and I appreciate it very much and I am sure there are others who will appreciate it as well..if they happen to even find out about it.
Many, many thanks to you! :)

If it could be done, it would sort out the clothing availability, although with Studio Pro 3, I think they already had an earlier version of Morph Follower. The clothes WILL distort because of the morph being so extreme... think a teensy prrinted tshirt stretching a LOT over the bust and hips but shrinking at the waist, but it would still be usable. In any case, back when this was released, it wasn't an option.

On the other hand, if you can manage to translate Mortella to Genesis, you'd still not have the exact same dress available for the resulting character, as there is no conforming version of it, and Poser dynamics are not suitable for use in Studio.

First the booboos. The dress was made back in 2007, so it is quite old. The char was made for V4 or V4.1, and unlike what I thought, the body was created through dialing, although the morph is quite extreme. So to use it today you do need to inj all the Morphs++ into V4.2 before inj the char or you'll get nothing. The head, however, is 100% original, and uses scaling, so for using hair you will have to apply a suitable morph... I've used A4 on the hair I've used to get the desired effect. The other booboo, stupid as it sounds, is that back when Maelwenn sent me the char to work on the dress, she was still working on the textures, and as a consequence I never got them LOL Maybe I was originally waiting for the full char to finish setting things up, but frankly, after 5 years, I just don't remember.

The good news is that not only I've found the original OBJ, but also my original C4D file, which meant that editing it was doable without giving me bald scalp patches :) I've made sure that it was fitting properly (turns out the original had a couple of spots that had pokethrough and it was affecting the simulations) and also created several MAT zones to help create more clothing for the char... The new MatZones allow you to give her short sleeves, no sleeves, deeper no-sleeves, no bottom tentacles, and a shorter skirt. I've also triangulated the mesh for a nicer, smoother look on the dynamics.

The results are below. I've used Surreality's Equinox' skin, as it's lovely and pale, and Amphitrite Hair. The dress uses Skyewolf's glitter materials. I'm also attaching a T-pose with the new material zones, it could probably be improved by adding cuts on certain sections but that's as much as I could do with what I had without getting into the load of extra work that I didn't want to take on.

I'll be adding a zero pose necessary for starting the simulations, and packing, and I think that will be it. There's a tut on my website already on how to use dynamics in Poser which I will include in the zip.

Hope this will finally settle the issue, and give people what they've been asking for.

You're welcome :) I hope you can enjoy it. It's quite simple really, to make it look its best use good material; above I've used Skyewolf's glitter material, if you want some, download the Aiko Eve dress from my website; it has some procedural materials made by Skye for Aiko Eve but they can be used on the Mortella Dress too.

And another render, showing what you can do with the material zones. This is the exact same dress.

Also worth mentioning, if you're using shoes with heels or platforms, like I am in this render, it's worth making sure that you position V4 in the exact level to begin with, and also translate the dress *exactly the same amount* to avoid problems with the calculations.

The renders above were calculated and made in PP2010, this one is PP2012. Still Equinox and Amphitrite hair, and Mourning Moon boots on her feet.

I managed to get the dress into Daz and fit it to Genesis. I can see why you wouldn't want to try to put controllers/bones/whatcha-ma-callems on the tentacles. Painstaking work. Anyway, here's my effort. I couldn't get Mortella thru to Genesis (need a refresher in GenX :)), but I did use the skin.

it's less a question of rigging the tentacles and more a question of overall rigging. Poser tech is notoriously difficult when things are too close together, like the thighs would on such a tight skirt. I doubt rigging it for Genesis would be much different, or would result in anything capable of passing QA in any of the major brokerages. With hobble dresses/skirts there's also the problem of the movement limits, that cannot be hard coded because they depend a lot on the rest of the body. Example: you can bend both thighs 90º to sit down without issue, but you can't bend one thigh to lift one leg like a cancan dancer as the skirt would prevent you from doing this; you can bend both forelegs to kneel, but you can't bend just one without the skirt riding up to the knee. A good example of how this happens is shown above in the blue dress image, if you look closely you can see the wrinkle around her bum cause by the angle of the leg; any skirt in reality would do that, but it would be impossible to rig this way for either Poser or Genesis, as something would need to check that the angles between both legs remain within a particular limit... I'm not sure the tech can do that at all.

So when doing the dress for Maelwenn, we focused on something quick and realistic, and the only way to give it realistic movement was to do it as a dynamic.

Oh yes, completely understand. Never thought about movement limitations, but wearing a skirt like that in real life would limit your movement quite a bit - and I do understand why you used dynamics, it looks brilliant, just excited that I could get it to work in Daz :)

For what it's worth, the item was V4 Hollywood dress here: http://www.cyclopsstudio.net/Freebies.htm (it's down in the last section at the bottom of the page). I also have a full promo spread for it, though I have no idea where I found it.